For what it is worth, our local kayaking club, The Chesapeake Paddlers Association has about 550 or so members at present. This number probably represents a good portion of the serious kayakers in our region, although not all of the 550 are "serious". When you consider that the Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the US, with temperate weather conditions and a long paddling season, that's not a lot of paddlers. This is ture even if you double or triple the numbers to pick up non joiners and people living far from our membership base, which, I think, is concentrated in the northern half of the bay. Extrapolate this to the country at large and 250,000 looks to be overstated by maybe a factor of 10. Having said that, our annual training weekend for new paddlers has grown tremendously over the past years (double and triple digit growth with many people turned away due to lack of room and volunteer instructors), and if the kayaking community is growing at the same rate as interest in the training programs then 250,000 might be accurate in a few years. I wonder what other kayaking clubs are reporting for membership? A total of the membership in the various clubs in the US would give you a good handle on the poplulation I think. John Blackburn *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Mon May 06 2002 - 09:05:20 PDT
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